Fra Giovanni Giocondo, who is is known to have been engaged from 1476 to 1488 in Verona on the Loggia del Consiglio, had worked as a engineer at Poggioreale in Naples around 1490.

Born in Verona around 1433, he had joined the Dominican Order at the age of eighteen and had been one of the many of this Order who promulgate the Renaissance.

Afterwards, however, he had left the Dominicans and entered the Franciscan Order.

Giocondo had begun his career as a teacher of Latin and Greek in Verona, where Julius Caesar Scaliger had been one of his pupils.

A learned archaeologist and a superb draftsman, the young priest had visited Rome, sketched its ancient buildings, written the story of its great monuments, and recorded, deciphered and explained many defaced inscriptions.

He has stimulated the revival of classical learning by making transcriptions of ancient manuscripts, one of which, completed in 1492, he presents to Lorenzo de' Medici.

Giocondo soon returns to his native town, where he builds bridges and planned fortifications for Treviso, acting as architect engineer, and head-builder during the construction.

In Verona, Giocondo designs the Palazzo del Consiglio for Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor.

It is considered one of the finest buildings in Verona and is famed for the decorations of its loggia.

Thomas de Quincey also attributes the church of Santa Maria della Scala to Giocondo.

He is then summoned to Venice, along with a number of other well-known architects, to discuss the protection of the lagoons against the rivers.

Giocondo's plan of altering the Brenta's bed and leading this river to the sea is accepted by the Venetians, and the undertaking is a complete success.

Giorgione and the young Titian revolutionize the genre of the portrait.

It is exceedingly difficult and sometimes simply impossible to differentiate Titian's early works from those of Giorgione.

None of Giorgione's paintings are signed and only one bears a reliable date: his portrait of Laura (June 1, 1506), one of the first to be painted in the "modern manner", distinguished by dignity, clarity, and sophisticated characterization.

Italian scholar and engineer Fra Giovanni Giocondo, who has worked throughout Italy and in France for Charles VIII and Louis XII, mostly as an advisor, works on the defenses of Venice in about 1506.

Fra Giovanni Giocondo’s influential 1511 edition of Vitruvius becomes a primary reference for contemporary architects.

King Manuel I of Portugal sends to Pope Leo X on March 1514 a huge and exotic embassy led by Tristão da Cunha, who tours the streets of Rome in an extravagant procession of animals from the colonies and wealth from the Indies that struck Europe.

Albuquerque’s reputation reaches its peak, laying the foundations of the Portuguese Empire in the East.

Bramante, one of the most influential Italian architects of the Renaissance, dies at seventy on March 11, 1514, outliving his patron, the energetic warrior-pope Julius II by little more than a year.

The painter Raphael, now thirty-one, succeeds Bramante as chief architect of Saint Peter's Basilica; Pope Leo X appoints the respected Fra Giovanni Giocondo, now past eighty, to assist him on the partially completed domed church.

With religious conservatism apparently ended by this time, Raphael substitutes a longitudinal plan for Bramante’s central design, although the historical details are complex.

Unfortunately, the deaths of Julius and of Bramante prevent the rebuilding of St. Peter's from progressing much beyond the planning stage.

(Nothing on Raphael’s plan is actually built, but some of his other architectural designs are carried out, including a chapel for Agostino Chigi in Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome; the Vidoni-Caffarelli Palace—now substantially enlarged—and the incomplete Villa Madama, both also in Rome.)

Raphael also designs the Pandolfini Palace in Florence.